Dollars for drones? —

Student busted for selling wayward drone online

Snatch a helicopter drone up after emergency landing, try to auction it online.

A 24-year old college student in Bologna, Italy was arrested by Italian postal police after attempting to sell a drone that had emergency-landed on his apartment's terrace last October. The student had posted the drone, a privately operated Microdrones quad-rotor helicopter owned by Italian startup Eye Sky, on Subito.it, an online auction site. The asking price for the $40,000 drone: 1,000 euros.

"The drone is almost brand new," he claimed in his auction posting. "The only flaw is that it lacks the remote control: I dropped by great height and it broke." Unfortunately, he included Eye Sky's name along with the make and model number in the description of the drone—which identified it to police. He has been charged with misappropriation of lost property, which could result in up to a year's jail time and fines.

The Microdrones md4-200 VTOL drone was configured by Eye Sky to collect 360-degree panoramic images. The company has used the drone in the past for aerial photographic surveys to assist local government—including a damage-assessment survey after the 6.0-magnitude earthquake in Bologna last May. It also surveyed the damage caused by a recent illegal off-road truck rally in a city park. Eye Sky—founded by two architects, a geologist, and a builder—was on a demonstration flight last October 17 over the University of Bologna.

The flight happened to correspond with the University's Alma Fest, its "festival of freshmen," according to a report from La Repubblica—perhaps to demonstrate the drone's potential use by the school for monitoring crowds during events and student protests. But according to Eye Sky, the drone lost its GPS navigation signals and then initiated an emergency landing. Soon after it touched down it disappeared, only to appear on an auction site a few days later.

It took several months for Italian postal police to track down the unnamed student. Once they located the drone on Subito.it, police posed as potential buyers requesting additional information. They connected the student to the e-mail address used by the seller—he had also used it to register on a dating website. The police were able to fix the location of the seller by photos he sent that had views of the city outside his apartment window.